Microsoft has made Windows 8's final release available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers, so if you are one of those - have fun. The 90-day trial has also been released, so us mere mortals can have a go at it as well. The evaluation version is Windows 8 Enterprise, so it contains a number of features regular users normally won't see. As far as I can tell - it's a bit unclear - the trial version cannot be upgraded to a final version a few months down the line. Happy testing!

I find it interesting MS claims Windows 8 will run on any hardware which supports 7. My hardware came with 7 pre-installed and Win8 won't boot on it.

Yeah, I've also seen some hardware-related bugs. For example, the motherboard on my home-built machine causes a timeout during Windows 8 setup. You can successfully complete the install after it times out, and Windows 8 will run just fine -- but you've got to wait 15 minutes first.

What they probably mean is that the hardware meets the minimum system requirements for Windows 8. There may be driver incompatibilities that will have to wait for the hardware manufacturers to catch up on.

I'd expect compatibility to be about as good as Vista-to-7. Not perfect, but a whole lot better than XP-to-Vista.